Category Archives: Slice of Life

Visual Slice of Life: The Eyes Have It

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

This is a sample of some of the faces created and shared by students last week as we talked about “reading emotions” in the Pandemic, when our masks cover our faces.

Their task, as part of our social-emotional lesson, was to answer the question: How are you feeling about coming back in full to school?

(Which happens this coming week) They had to capture their feeling in a picture with both a mask and mask-less face, as we then talked about the importance of our eyes and addressed any anxiety over the coming changes ahead for our school.

Classroom Face Collage

Peace (noticed),
Kevin

Slice of Life/Day in a Sentence: One Year Ago Today

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

It was exactly one year ago, today, when we walked out of the classroom on a Friday afternoon (the 13th) and never returned to the building for rest of the school year.

Peace (thinking on a year),
Kevin

 

Slice of Life/Day in a Sentence: The Books They Choose

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

I do love it so very much when I get a chance to see the choices my students make for the books they want to be, and are, reading.

Peace (in pages),
Kevin

 

Slice of Life/Day in a Sentence: The Pickleball Crew

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

We ended our play back when the days became so short that night fell nearly right on the end of the work day but we picked up our paddles again this week, and reset the net, as the hopeful days incrementally stretch the light further into late afternoon hours.

Peace (and Pickleball with friends),
Kevin

Slice of Life/Day in a Sentence: We Do Have Fun With Words

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

Words in a Cloud 2021

Give them a chance, and young writers will invent words that will spark your pondering and set you guffawing, and make you wonder where our language might yet be heading.*

Peace (invented and spoken),
Kevin

*This is the 17th year that my sixth graders have been building an online collaborative dictionary of invented words. It’s part of a unit on word origins. Each year, every student adds a new word, and their voice (through audio file), to the dictionary. It’s just one of those annual rituals that keeps moving forward …

Listen to this year’s voice collection.

 

Slice of Life/Day in a Sentence: Why, Indeed

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

Why am I spending so much of my free time refreshing government websites that don’t seem to function right in order to find a scheduling spot on a calendar that doesn’t seem to have openings for a vaccine that may not yet be in abundance enough to be readily available?*

Peace (refreshing it often),
Kevin

*Our school is coming back full, in phases, starting next week with my grade. That’s one reason why.

Slice of Life/Day in a Sentence: From Poem to Words to Color to Notes to Music

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

Sometimes when creative inspiration hits — like how words of a poem might be translated into color, and how those colors might be translated into music — it’s best to dive in and ride the wave all the way to the end.

Peace (deep in the key),
Kevin

PS — This project essentially takes two lines from a 106-line collaborative poem, turns those words into color with a tech font tool that my friend, Wendy, found and then turns those colors into musical notes, which I then played on keyboard in a software, using an avante garde /new music style of playing, while later adding layers of sounds to expand the composition.

 

Musical Slice of Life: Tuned Into Open

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

I will often have stretches where I am writing lots of songs and the ideas are everywhere. Then there are the fallow times, when nothing seems to be flowing in any certain direction. I’ve learned to be patient — that the songs will still come. But I have also developed some strategies — pick up another instrument, try a new loop pack, or tune my guitar into another key.

That’s what I was doing yesterday — exploring open tuning on my guitar and this little sequence of riffs began to play out. I like open tuning now and then because of the space it creates on the fretboard.

This piece is short but long enough to remind me that music is all around, even if sometimes you need to approach it, slant (as Emily D might say). The title is merely a hopeful gesture of wording  …

Peace (sounds like),
Kevin

Slice of Life/Day in a Sentence: In That Moment, A Poem

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(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

In the moment in which that solitary snowflake landed in her outstretched hand, as if she were capturing a bit of loosened magic from the sky, the start of a small poem, too, tumbled into my head.

HandScratchPoemDraft(A draft started in freewrite time with students, revised during the day)

Peace (falling),
Kevin

Little Geometry

One single silent
snowflake, loose
– a goose lost from
its group – slow-motion
tumbler

Its landing softened
by her outstretched
hand: melted time

then, her lips
on skin
on ice
on sand

We’re lost in a
moment we may
never understand